


Right Hand

by Zordosia (orphan_account)



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Abusive Parents, Canon Era, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, In which John and Alex's daddy issues match up for once, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-23
Updated: 2017-03-23
Packaged: 2018-10-09 07:03:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10406583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Zordosia
Summary: The General and his son came down to the aide’s workroom together, Alexander Washington always a step behind his father. They would go into his office and the General would sit at his desk, where he could survey the workroom, and Alex would sit off to the side with his lap desk, concealed from view.





	

    The General and his son came down to the aide’s workroom together, Alexander Washington always a step behind his father. They would go into his office and the General would sit at his desk, where he could survey the workroom, and Alex would sit off to the side with his lap desk, concealed from view. Alex was very clever, very quick, but there was not much for him to do around headquarters. And so he sat by his father’s side, for the most part, grabbing the documents the aides placed in front of him and scanning them quickly, marking them up and handing them back, and only when Alex had nothing to say would the document go to the General.  
  
    Whenever John walked into the General’s office, he would glance over at Alex, because Alex was the aides’ barometer of the General’s mood. If Alex’s face was relaxed and easy and in its resting state of slightly upturned lips, the General was well. If Alex’s face was a blank mask, the General was in a bad mood. On those days, Alex would be absent from dinner as well. One time he was absent in the morning, and after an hour the General had heaved himself up and gone upstairs to their quarters. They had heard Alex scream something unintelligible and they had braced themselves for the General’s roar, but nothing came. After a few minutes they had come back down, Alex one step behind the General. His face had been a blank mask for the rest of the day but the General had been amiable enough.  
  
    Two days after that, John had come in to the office. Alex’s face boded poorly, and so he was shocked when the General had smiled widely as he read the letter John had prepared, stood up, and clapped John on the shoulder.  
  
    “You do such great work here, son,” the General said. “I’m so proud to have you on my staff.”  
  
    John felt his face grow warm and he quickly got out a “thank you, sir,” and turned to go before his blush grew too deep. As he left, he saw Alex’s face screwed up in fury, but it settled back into the mask so quickly John could almost convince himself he had imagined it.  
  
-  
  
    When third dance of the night had ended, the General’s son was next to John and his partner, Miss Elizabeth Schuyler. The couples all bow to each other and John turned to greet Alexander but before he can, Miss Schuyler jumped in with a “Colonel Washington! I haven’t seen you since Morristown!”  
  
    Alexander laughed and bowed, kissing her hand, and Miss Schuyler beamed. “I’m so sorry, Eliza. I’ve been kept quite busy these past few months.”  
  
    “Well,” she said, looking down shyly. John felt quite forgotten. “You could make it to me with a dance.”  
  
    Alexander suddenly looked very uncomfortable. He glanced around the room and coughed. “I’m very sorry, Miss Schuyler,” he said. “But I ah— promised this next dance to another lady. Some other time. It was lovely to see you.” And he darted away, leaving Eliza looking absolutely mortified.  
  
    John gently placed his hands back in position, and started to lead her across the floor again. She ducked her head down and he kept his gaze straight ahead. “He does that with everyone, you know,” he said quietly. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him dance with the same girl twice.”  
  
    “I know,” she said. Her voice sounded steady, and John was a little relieved he won’t be seen dancing with a crying girl. “But we got along so well at Morristown. I thought he’d… I thought he’d want to.”  
  
    John scanned the ballroom and found Alex leaning in the shadows, watching them. When he caught John’s eye, he turned around and exited. John sighed. “I’ll go talk to him for you. I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding.”  
  
    He went down the hallway Alex had disappeared down. It led to a porch on the back of the house, and John could see Alex’s silhouette there. John stepped out behind him and Alex turned around quickly, and then smiled a little sheepishly when he saw it was John.  
  
    “Did Eliza send you?”  
  
    “Not quite,” John said, and Alex shook his head.  
  
    “You’re very considerate.”  
  
    “And you’re very stupid.” Alex looked startled, then laughed, and John felt himself smiling too. “Miss Schuyler is a wonderful woman, and she seems quite taken with you. You should dance with her.”  
  
    Alex’s laughter died down and his smile seemed sadder. He sat down on the porch’s stoop. “My father wants me to marry a girl from Virginia,” he said. “He doesn’t want me traveling outside of the state any more than I have to.”  
  
    John laughed again, thinking Alex was joking. Alex remained silent. John quickly stopped laughing and contemplated running for the woods.  
  
    “Well, ah,” he said finally. “I am— I’m sure your father must have— political considerations—“ Here, Alex laughed, and John stopped.  
  
    “Oh, I’m sure he does,” Alex said. He looked up at John and grinned at his desperately awkward expression, and stood back up. “But all that aside, the point of this is, I’ll leave Eliza for you. You’re right, she is a wonderful girl.”  
  
    John eyed the woods over his shoulder. “It’s ah. Okay. I think she has her heart set on you.”  
  
    “That’s what you say? A kind, beautiful, connected girl, and you’re giving up on her because she has a bit of a crush?”  
  
    “I’m married.” The words came out without him quite meaning to, and he instantly regretted them, even though they were true and even though they made Alex stop asking questions. But all his unasked questions hung between them, and so John said, “I don’t love her.” Then he added, as an afterthought, “and she’s British.”  
  
    Alex didn’t say anything, and so John continued talking, everything he had kept so firmly tamped down springing out of his mouth. “We have a daughter. I didn’t get to meet her. Her name’s Frances. Her name’s Martha. Our families were in business together. We were friends beforehand. She was the closest friend I had in London. I had never…” The pressure of thinking about it all was too much, and he couldn’t say it. Alex looked up at him with wide eyes. “We were each other’s… I didn’t…”  
  
    Alex put his hand on his shoulder. “You did the right thing by marrying her,” he said. “I’m glad you did.”  
  
    John remembered his father’s stony silence the first time he had seen him after the wedding. He had wanted so badly to hear those words for so long, and even though it was coming from the wrong mouth, he still felt like crying. The two of them stood there for a minute, until John felt like he could speak without his voice cracking, at which point he said, “Thank you.” Alex nodded and gently pulled John down to sit on the stoop. They sat there for a minute, Alex holding his hand and John trying to think of all the ways what he had said could be used to hurt him. Then Alex snapped him out of his thoughts by putting a hand on his cheek. He turned to face him, surprised, and Alex kissed him.  
  
    He stayed there, kissing him, for a minute or so, because Alex was handsome and he was warm in the winter air and it had been so long. Then he remembered everything and pulled back, terrified. He looked at Alex and Alex’s face was that blank mask.  
  
    “Was that not…?” Alex asked casually, like he was asking John if he had spelled a name wrong on a letter.  
  
    John shook his head quickly. “No, it’s just that—“ And the mask fell and Alex broke into a big smile and kissed him again, quickly, then stood up and pulled John to his feet.  
  
    “It’s alright, John,” he said. “No one will know. Don’t worry about it.” Then he turned and went back into the mansion, whistling. After a minute, John followed.  
  
    When he came back in to the ballroom, Eliza was dancing with Tench Tilghman. When the dance is over he sidled up to them and she pivoted into a dance with him. “Well?”  
  
    “He. Ah.” John’s throat was suddenly quite dry. “He has someone from down South.”  
  
    Eliza’s gaze dropped and John worried about her crying all over again. Then she rolled her eyes and muttered, “typical.” She started and looked up at him and they both laughed nervously, for very different reasons.  
  
-  
  
    The General’s son stayed in a room of his own. The room used to be the maid’s quarters, so the cot was harder and narrower than John’s own bunk, and there was a loose floorboard a few paces from the door that squeaked loudly whenever John stepped on it. But Alex was in the room so every night, John waited until all the other aides had fallen asleep, and then stole up to it.  
  
    He felt immensely guilty about it. He was going behind the General’s back, leading his beloved son down this terrible path, when the General watched over them working every day with a steady eye and corrected them when they made mistakes and when his silent contentment at the end of a day when all had gone well was worth every discomfort and pain of the job. He thought about trying to talk to Alex about it, but then Alex had told him about how he had done this before, at boarding school, and sounded so proud of himself that John felt a bit silly about all his uneasiness.  
  
    But he also knew that Alex would watch him every time he approached the General’s desk. And he hadn’t missed the look of anger on Alex’s face when the General had praised John’s work on a report, and John felt all the giddiness drain out of him. Alex had disappeared the rest of that day, and that night Alex was not in his room and John saw lights on in the workroom. He went back to his bunk and he knew Alex knew that he had left him there, and they did not talk about it.  
  
-  
  
    General Benedict Arnold arrived at headquarters, to discuss the fall of Fort Ticonderoga. John remembered his father mentioning him in letters, complaining about how he argued with Congress and was too much of a striver to curry the least bit of favor. But thankfully Arnold did not interact with the aides, and instead Alex lead him straight to the General’s office. The aides heard the sound of loud, angry conversation. Then Arnold walked briskly out of the office, Alex looking after him anxiously and the General looking after him stormily. Alex closed the door and a few moments later reopened it, and hurried after Arnold. The aides did not have their barometer that day but they were quickly able to discern that the General was in a terrible mood.  
  
    “He’s an amazing man,” Alex said that night.  
  
    John looked over at him. Alex was lying curled on his chest, his arm draped across him. “Who is?”  
  
    “Benedict Arnold.” John hummed and Alex continued. “He had a terrible childhood. So many of his siblings died.” Alex paused. “His father was an alcoholic. Left their family all the time. Arnold was telling me this, over drinks. He said that after his mother died, he had to raise his family by himself, for the most part.”  
  
    “That’s very brave of him.”  
  
    “They were very poor,” Alex said, and John could tell that he wasn’t really listening, that he just needed to talk. “I remember being poor. He started working for his bread around when I did.”  
  
    “But the General saved you,” John said, trying to comfort him. But when he looked down at Alex, his brow was still knit and he was still frowning.  
  
    “My father cried when he saw where I had been working,” he said softly. “I had only been there for a few months. There were other children there, children who’d been there for much longer than me. He said I’d never have to live like that ever again and he took me away.”  
  
    John watched him and Alex pushed himself up on his elbows and looked into his eyes. “John, what are you fighting for?”  
  
    He looked away and cleared his throat. “For freedom, of course. From… an oppressive government.”  
  
    “Is it really freedom? Is it really any different? They’re all the same, John,” Alex said. He pushed himself up so he could properly look down on John. “They’re all the same. They all love their money and hate being asked to part with it and couldn’t give a damn about anyone but themselves. They’re too engorged to move an inch. It’ll just be replacing one tyranny with another, John. You have to see that.” John forced himself to look back up and Alex was staring at John desperately, and John could almost see tears in his eyes, his eyes that looked just like the general’s. “You see it, don’t you?”  
  
    John remembered standing on the porch telling Alex about the worst thing that he had done and how he had still accepted him. And here he was in his arms, evidence of the worst thing that he was, and he still accepted him. And John still could not bring himself to say anything at all. Alex dropped back down and they lay there together for a bit before John had to sneak back to the bunks.  
  
-  
  
    When the treason plot was discovered, the British had made plans for extracting Benedict Arnold, but not for extracting Alexander Washington. And so Alex was captured and tried and sentenced. The aides all debated among themselves whether or not they should visit, if it was worth the suspicion they would gather by being friends with a traitor, and what would the General think. But in the end the General had brought Alex to his quarters and refused any visitors, and so the last time John saw him was at the hanging.  
  
    Alex’s face was that blank mask until the last second, right before they put the hood over his head, and then he had looked as terrified as a lost child. Then the hood was on and John forced himself to watch, because he would not let his last moments with Alex be marred by even more of his cowardice.  
  
    The aides had worked, after the hanging, because it was still a war, but they did not see the General all day. Until John, the last one to leave, walked down the hallway, and he could not help himself from looking at Alex’s room. And the door was open and a lantern was lit and the General was sitting there, far too big for such cramped quarters, almost ridiculous in how he dwarfed the cot he was sitting on.  
  
    They made eye contact and John froze and the General nodded. John stepped into the doorway and could not think of a thing to say. The General was holding Alex’s continental uniform in his hands, his knuckles white from how hard he was gripping it.  
  
    “I’m very sorry, sir,” said John. He wanted so badly to just leave, to just go back to his bunk, to go to sleep and to recluse himself from knowing what had happened for just a few hours, and to never see anything that Alex had touched ever again.  
  
    The General laughed once and said, “Don’t be. He told me it had nothing to do with me.” He stood up, pushing the chair back, his big shadow all over the small furniture. John nodded once and went to his bunk and had terrible nightmares when he finally fell asleep.  
  
    The next week, he was transferred to the Southern front. He stood in South Carolina and the swamp air smelled like his childhood and everyone around him looked like family. The British had every advantage but he had been given a command, so he settled in to work. That night he wrote a letter to Martha for the first time in a year or so and asked how his daughter was doing.

**Author's Note:**

> Credit for the Hamilton-Arnold relationship and the idea of Washingdad goes to athelien's Aegis and Fig Tree series, @herowndeliverance on tumblr.
> 
> Inspired by discussion with @runawayforthesummer about how Alex's resentment of Washington in his aide days wasn't him being "proud" or "rebellious" or "not believing he was worthy of love"- it was him chafing against paternalistic manipulation. Thank you Chelsea, for being my salt mate and just for you, Eliza ends up with Tilghman.
> 
> I'm at @tacticalgrandma on tumblr, if you want to talk there.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading this. Comments and kudos mean the world to me, so if you want to leave any of those, I would really appreciate it!


End file.
